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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

We now have BL3 running in loop on a
Northgate Slimlite 386SX20 with 387 coprocessor
5MB RAM, of which 4.7 gets tested at bootup - 640 bsae, 384 EMS (you can 
use 128 of that as shadow RAM, which does get checked)

We had to solder in a battery holder, make a power supply (and use it as 
the switch because the real switch is not working right), and replace the 
backlight with a slightly longer one (I heard sounds of drilling).  With 
the backlight in it the cursor is visible.  The keyboard is not working 
but the rest is now usable.

We replaced the 42MB hard drive with a 120MB from a recycled 486, and were 
able to format it with FreeDOS.  We tried with MS-DOS 7.10 but it kept 
stalling at 48% and then returning to the prompt.  FreeDOS scandisk slowed 
down to a crawl from 48 to 78% then sped up again, and did not find any 
bad sectors.  So it is good we have a choice of DOSes.  What might cause 
this sort of problem?

BL3 was installed to the first 25MB (the faster area) and we will 
partition it into two 60MB partitions and use the second for ext2 linux 
and see if there is a speed problem.  If there is, we can use the first 
half for linux instead.

BL3 booted in 65 seconds (with shadow RAM enabled).

Is there some way to get ls to display in mono?  This is a greyscale VGA 
LCD screen.  I will try using it with zgv from BL1 set up as a links2 
viewer.  Some time I would like to try compiling links2 to work with 
SVGAlib and see if it can function in 5MB.

More soon on the results of using netcat and lilo here.